[This week’s top story comes from Jemstep, as the B2B online investment platform was acquired by Invesco, the $800 billion dollar asset manager based a stone’s throw away from my studio right here in Atlanta.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, Jemstep’s leadership will stay onboard to run the Invesco subsidiary, and for now, the company says there won’t be any changes to existing partnerships, custodians, or asset availability in model portfolios.

Ignoring B2C acquisitions of FutureAdvisor and LearnVest, the last twelve months have seen John Hancock acquire Guide Financial and Envestnet acquire Upside.

So who are the independent B2B providers left? I see Autopilot, Trizic, Oranj, Vanare, Betterment Institutional, Motif Investing, and to some extent, the roll-your-own open source platform from Wealthbot.] Invesco Ltd. has acquired Jemstep, a market-leading provider of advisor-focused digital solutions.

[But hold on! Sending shockwaves in the retail robo space is Snapchat, as rumors were flying this week that the ephemeral chat app might introduce it’s own investment service to its 100 million active daily users.

Uh, let me explain my thoughts in a brief demonstration… Get it, jump the shark?] Snapchat is understood to be at the front of a queue of tech firms developing Robo-Advisory technology – which uses algorithms to help users develop and implement customized investment strategies for retirement planning.

[But wait, there’s more! In its first move after being acquired by BlackRock, FutureAdvisor announced it is partnering with BBVA Compass to roll out the automated investment tools to the bank’s nearly 700 branches in the US.

Bank customers will get access to FutureAdvisors’ digital investment management for the standard fee of 50 basis points, and you can probably bet that new accounts opened up with be held with BBVA’s broker-dealer affiliate, which is how the bank capitalizes on the partnership.] BBVA Compass, the Sunbelt subsidiary of the Spanish banking giant, has announced it will partner with FutureAdvisor to offer its customers digital investment management, popularly known as Robo Advisors. It is the first major bank to sign on with FutureAdvisor since the advisory firm combined forces with BlackRock, the giant asset management company, last year.

[And if you’re not sick of robos by now, let me add news from Wealthfront who this week released a free Portfolio Review service to show investors how bad their current portfolios are and urge them to save a boat load of money by switching to Wealthfront. Whoops, did I say that out loud?

This concept is nothing new, as Personal Capital has offered a similar portfolio analyzer since 2011, and FeeX has been doing it since 2012, but here’s the deal. These VC-backed companies are spending tons of money to target your clients and prospects to get them to try out this tool, and of course, they’re going to tell clients they have suboptimal allocations and are paying high fees to their advisor.

So, expect clients to bring up fees, allocations, and performance in your next meeting, and you need to have a strong answer in the form of your value proposition, which is all the added advice, guidance, and behavior management you deliver that the automated services are incapable of providing.] In a bid to attract more assets, Wealthfront Inc. is joining other robo advisers in providing free advice to investors about their accounts at other financial institutions.

Here are stories that didn’t make this week’s broadcast:

Laserfiche just released version 10 of its enterprise content management system (ECM). Speaking at the Laserfiche Empower 2016 Conference in Long Beach, Calif., Laserfiche President Karl Chan said the new version is designed to supercharge content-driven business processes, enabling enterprises to redesign the flow of information throughout the enterprise.

Dashlane is one of our favorite password managers, and today the service updated with a new, consistent interface across all devices, an updated “password changer” that lets you change passwords on a site without even visiting it, new languages, and more.

6 Responses to “FPPad Bits and Bytes for January 15”

Ha, I know, right?!? But what if you can only see your account balance for 30 seconds, say, once every quarter? Now they might be on to something to stop investors from freaking out and selling their investments at the bottom of the market!

We use Jemstep and saw that news blast go out from them earlier this week.

As to your question as to whether it will be positive or negative, I don’t know. I very much like the Jemstep team and if they leave and/or or shaken up too bad then I think it will be bad. However, if they all stay and are given more resources, engineers, etc then I think it will be great in upgrading the platform and service.

I’m all in favor of advisors running better businesses and delivering better advice to clients, so I want this acquisition to be a benefit for Jemstep and their advisor customers. I also share your sentiment that I’d like to see the team stay on board and continue to enhance their solution. Based on their track record, they have good momentum on their side.

I share the same sentiments. I’m “on” Snapchat, but with poor community connections native to the app, I feel that I’m posting snaps into the great ether. That’s fine, I’m not interested in a popularity contest, but it’s equally challenging to find others who might post snaps I’m actually interested in.

Basically I have to use *other* platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to find someone who I feel has useful content, THEN head over to Snapchat to follow their snaps. But I originally found the person to be interested on Facebook, Twitter, etc., so why do I need to leave those platforms to use yet another platform? Frustrating.

It’s really convoluted, to be honest. If I miss others’ snaps, it’s not the end of the world. More and more of the popular snaps get posted (resnapped??) to Twitter anyway, so I will eventually see them anyway without opening Snapchat.